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February 17, 2023

Seawall’s Secret: The Selling of More Than Two Dozen Black Africans

The following is an excerpt from Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins, available wherever books are sold. In the antebellum United States, formerly enslaved men and women who told their stories and advocated for abolition helped establish a new genre with widely recognized tropes: the slave narrative. This book investigates how enslaved… Continue Reading Seawall’s Secret: The Selling of More Than Two Dozen Black Africans

Categories African American Studies/Colonial, Revolutionary Era & Early American History/Excerpts/Literature
February 10, 2023

Social Metabolisms: Precious Metal Mining and it’s Demands on Local Environments and People

The following is an excerpt from The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro: Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town, by Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, available now wherever books are sold. Social Metabolisms As the rate and scale of precious metal mining increased with each cycle of extractivist mining, its demands on local environments and people rose proportionally.… Continue Reading Social Metabolisms: Precious Metal Mining and it’s Demands on Local Environments and People

Categories Environmental Studies/Excerpts/Latin American & Caribbean Studies
January 27, 2023

Defining Indigeneity

The following is an excerpt from On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala by Sarah Foss, available wherever books are sold. Defining Indigeneity In 1945, the newly created IING sent surveys to the directors of national schools in sixteen of Guatemala’s twenty-two departments, selecting those with substantial Indigenous populations. Because a large majority of responders were… Continue Reading Defining Indigeneity

Categories Excerpts/Latin American & Caribbean Studies
January 25, 2023

Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists

The following is an excerpt from Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists: Queer Women in the Urban South by La Shonda Mims, available wherever books are sold. Writing candidly about her struggles to understand sexuality, Carson McCullers identified herself as a sexual invert. She sought inspiration in the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis, who was active in an early twentieth-century community of… Continue Reading Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists

Categories Excerpts/LGBT Studies
January 20, 2023

The Strikers of Coachella: Read the Intro

The following is an excerpt of The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement by Christian O. Paiz, available wherever books are sold. In a Small Place In the summer of 1969, the United Farm Workers (UFW) newspaper, El Malcriado, published an eight-photo spread titled “The Strikers of Coachella”: two of Mexican women, two of Filipino men, and… Continue Reading The Strikers of Coachella: Read the Intro

Categories Excerpts/Labor Studies
January 11, 2023

Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: An Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America by Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, available everywhere books are sold. THE MESSIANIC MOMENT, 1919–1931 The year 1919 marked the tercentennial of chattel slavery’s genesis in English North America. White supremacy may have warped notions of forgiveness, of forbearance, and of the significance of African bondage,… Continue Reading Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: An Excerpt

Categories Africa & African Diaspora/African American Studies/Excerpts
January 10, 2023

Native Americans and Enslaved Africans

The following is an excerpt from The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South by Charles Reagan Wilson, available everywhere books and ebooks are sold. Native Americans and Enslaved Africans Southern colonists, including Jefferson’s forebears, had been on the periphery of Western civilization at the beginning of settlement, but they self-consciously came as predominantly… Continue Reading Native Americans and Enslaved Africans

Categories Excerpts/Southern
January 4, 2023

Agriculture’s Energy: Introduction

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Agriculture’s Energy: The Trouble with Ethanol in Brazil’s Green Revolution by Thomas D. Rogers, available now wherever books are sold. From 1900 to 2000, in the midst of dramatic population growth, Brazil experienced a neat demographic inversion. At the same time that it grew by a factor of ten, from 17… Continue Reading Agriculture’s Energy: Introduction

Categories Excerpts/Latin American & Caribbean Studies
December 28, 2022

A Camp Meeting at the Gallows

The following is an excerpt from The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South by Michael Ayers Trotti, available now wherever books are sold. A Camp Meeting at the Gallows There is a fountain fill’d with blood,Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,Lose all their guilty stains,Lose all their guilty stains.The dying thief rejoiced… Continue Reading A Camp Meeting at the Gallows

Categories Excerpts/Southern
December 2, 2022

Making Our Future: An Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard, available everywhere books are sold. I have spent much of the past six years traveling in and across West Virginia, crisscrossing mountains, hollers, creeks, and rivers along dirt roads and highways on fieldwork trips to interview quilters, fiddlers, striking… Continue Reading Making Our Future: An Excerpt

Categories Excerpts/folklore
November 1, 2022

Global Christianity and the Cold War

The following is an excerpt from Global Faith, Worldly Power: Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire edited by John Corrigan, Melani McAlister, Axel R. Schäfer. Global Christianity and the Cold War The military and economic footprint of the U.S. abroad expanded rapidly after World War II. The growth of evangelical mission and humanitarian aid activities needs to be viewed in this context. The… Continue Reading Global Christianity and the Cold War

Categories American Studies/Excerpts/Religion
October 25, 2022

Refugees or Asylum-Seekers

The following is an excerpt from Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants & the Seeds of Resistance by Kristina Shull, available now everywhere books are sold. Refugees or Asylum-Seekers The massive scope and devastations of the Vietnam War indelibly scarred US political and social life, reshaping subsequent US refugee politics. Growing public divisions over the war also help to explain the seeming paradox… Continue Reading Refugees or Asylum-Seekers

Categories Excerpts/Latin American & Caribbean Studies/Political Science
October 5, 2022

Lula’s Rise From Metalworker to President of Brazil

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva commonly known as “Lula,” has won the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections by 48.4%, much tighter than many had expected. As we await the second round of election please enjoy this excerpt of Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil by John D. French, which was the winner of… Continue Reading Lula’s Rise From Metalworker to President of Brazil

Categories Excerpts/Latin American/Caribbean Hist./Political Science
September 23, 2022

Opposition and Misperceptions of Black Reparations

The following is an excerpt from the new preface of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, Second Edition by William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, available now from your favorite bookstore. Opposition to Black Reparations Two major strands of raw opposition to reparations arise out of misperceptions. One category of misperceptions involves the… Continue Reading Opposition and Misperceptions of Black Reparations

Categories African American History/African American Studies/Excerpts
September 15, 2022

The Peculiar Passion Surrounding Team Sports

The following is an excerpt from Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America by Randall Balmer, available everywhere books and e-books are sold. To Everything a Season The Peculiar Passion Surrounding Team Sports Competitive team sports developed in North America at a time of rapid social, economic, political, demographic—and religious—change. From the emergence of baseball in the 1840s to… Continue Reading The Peculiar Passion Surrounding Team Sports

Categories Excerpts/Religion/Sports
September 2, 2022

Remembering the Arab Scare: America’s Response to the Munich Olympic Attacks 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago, on September 5, 1972, Palestinian nationalist militants from the Black September organization stunned the world with an attack on Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. Satellite television turned the hostage-taking siege into an international live-action news drama, which reached a bloody climax in the deaths of a police officer, five militants, and all… Continue Reading Remembering the Arab Scare: America’s Response to the Munich Olympic Attacks 50 Years Later

Categories American History/Excerpts
August 31, 2022

Child-Saving During World War II

The following is an excerpt from Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States by Anita Casavantes Bradford, available everywhere books and e-books are sold. Collateral Humanitarianism Child-Saving during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, concerned Americans continued to improvise child evacuation programs to safeguard endangered children across the Atlantic. The nonsectarian coalition brought… Continue Reading Child-Saving During World War II

Categories Diplomatic History / International Affairs/Excerpts/Sociology
August 29, 2022

How Starving Soldiers Survived

The following is an excerpt from Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 by Ricardo A. Herrera available everywhere books and e-books are sold. Faced with the collapse of the commissariat and the all too real potential of scattering the army across eastern Pennsylvania so that it might feed itself, Washington was on the horns of a dilemma.… Continue Reading How Starving Soldiers Survived

Categories Colonial, Revolutionary Era & Early American History/Excerpts/Military History
August 22, 2022

The Emergence of Russian America on Alaska’s Coast

The following is an excerpt from Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 by Andrea Geiger. Russian America In 1783, four decades after Vitus Bering’s first foray along the Aleutian Islands in 1741, Russia established what would become the center of its commercial operations in “Aliaska” on what Russians called Kodiak Island midway along the southern… Continue Reading The Emergence of Russian America on Alaska’s Coast

Categories American Studies/Canadian Studies/Excerpts/Native Amer./Indigenous Studies
August 19, 2022

Looking Back: A Year After Taliban Regains Control in Afghanistan

In August of 2021, twenty years after the US-led-invasion ousted them from power, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan. In Us Versus Them: The United States, Radical Islam, and the Rise of the Green Threat, Second Edition acclaimed historian of U.S.–Middle East foreign relations, Douglas Little, examines how American presidents, policy makers, and diplomats dealt with the rise of Islamic… Continue Reading Looking Back: A Year After Taliban Regains Control in Afghanistan

Categories Diplomatic History / International Affairs/Excerpts/Middle Eastern Studies